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Here’s Looking at Me, Kid

JAMIE LYNN SPEARS is a narcissist, to say nothing of her older sister. So is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bill, too! Clearly, the word was created with A-Rod in mind. And who can forget Eliot Spitzer? But please, let’s forget this month’s narcissist du headline, Peter Cook, the philandering ex-husband of the model Christie Brinkley.

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, is a narcissist. (Chuck Hagel?) Madonna seemingly takes nightly baths in her own reflected glow. Have we forgotten anybody pop-analyzed with that word in the last six minutes? Naomi Campbell, anyone?

As stunningly disparate as they are, all of these folks and many others, including Saddam Hussein and Russell Crowe, have been labeled as narcissists. It has become the go-to diagnosis by columnists, bloggers and television psychologists. A term that has deep roots in psychoanalytic literature appears to have become a popular descriptor so bloated as to have been rendered meaningless.

“It sounds more impressive to say that someone is narcissistic rather than a jerk,” said Dr. Susan Jaffe, a Manhattan psychoanalyst.

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Ron Barrett

Are any of these characters actually narcissists? Only their therapists know for sure.

We love to label the offensive behavior of others to separate them from us; it’s their problem, not ours. And labels have their periods of vogue (see “chauvinist”).

But while it has acquired a silly elasticity, it has also acquired rich layers of meaning. For though the word has a derogatory stamp, the very people we label narcissistic often are those who attract as well as repel us.

“The study of narcissism is a growth industry in academia,” said Daniel Ames, a social and personality psychologist at Columbia Business School, who administers a narcissistic personality test to his students. “It helps us to understand and explain behavior, whether it’s in the bedroom or the boardroom. And it’s just a lot of fun to talk about.”

But during the recent Brinkley-Cook custody smearfest, Dr. Stephen Herman, a court-appointed psychiatrist affiliated with Weill Medical College of Cornell University, did not have fun in mind when he testified that Mr. Cook was a narcissist. In a phone interview last week, he explained that he had been using the term in its clinical sense, “not so much to label someone but to give insight into behavior, and indicate the relatively inflexible personality characteristic that it is.”

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Alex RodriguezCredit
Joe Corrigan/Getty Images

In the clinical diagnostic manual, the many criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy.”

Havelock Ellis, the late-19th-century British sexologist, has been credited with coining the term “narcissist,” after the myth of Narcissus, the Greek youth fatally enamored of his own reflection.

Narcissists, Freud later wrote, were nearly untreatable. Unspeakably lonely and shackled by grandiose fantasies, they were incapable of forming relationships, not even with a psychoanalyst.

In the 1970s, several psychoanalysts argued that narcissistic personality disorder occurs across a continuum and is not impervious to treatment — a theory that continues to be refined. Today, therapists say, patients who receive a diagnosis of the disorder remain among the most challenging to help because they often believe their problem is that others never sufficiently recognize how special they are. In childhood they had been deprived of essential emotional sustenance; as adults, their arrogance, sense of entitlement and exhibitionistic tendencies spring from the deepest humiliation.

Dr. Marion Solomon, a Los Angeles psychologist and author of “Narcissism and Intimacy,” said that true narcissists are startled when their spouses say they are miserable in the relationship. They come into treatment, she said, only at the urging of their partner.

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Jamie Lynn SpearsCredit
Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press

As narcissism gained greater clinical consideration, it penetrated the culture as well, after Tom Wolfe’s declaration of the ’70s as “the Me decade” and Christopher Lasch’s book “The Culture of Narcissism.”

“Narcissism became equated in a simplistic way with selfishness and self-centeredness,” said Natasha Zaretsky, who teaches modern cultural history at Southern Illinois University. “It became a catchall for people turning inward and retreating from the politics of the ’60s.”

By the 1980s, “narcissistic,” like other psychological terminology — “insane,” “psychotic,” “hysterical” — was seeping into the popular vernacular. Back then, narcissistic was the pop-psych, dismissive explanation for the scourge of that era, the single man incapable of committing. (ABC has since restored him to “The Bachelor.”)

Narcissism has fresh currency. In parenting debates about praise and self-esteem, critics fear we are raising a generation of narcissists. But Richard Robins, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, notes that earned self-confidence can be mistakenly dismissed as narcissistic. A narcissist’s self-confidence is inflated and superficial, masking a bottomless insecurity.

And, in a culture crazed, so to speak, by Internet-ratcheted celebrity, which gets its thrills from the coarsest exhibitionists, “narcissistic” has become an automatic-pilot term to describe the preening of the famous.

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Eliot SpitzerCredit
Mike Groll/Associated Press

“We’ve developed a different kind of narcissism,” Dr. Solomon said. “You’re successful, famous and treated as the center of the world. ‘Oh, Tom Cruise, how can I take care of your needs?’ So you start to believe you’re the center of the world because that is how the world treats you.”

And, some psychoanalysts say, our fascination with celebrities as well as our need to diminish them is its own kind of narcissistic narrative, including grandiose heights and abject humiliation.

The playground superhero fantasies of children are normal, explained Dr. George Makari, author of “Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis.”

“We have to mature out of the grandiose, childlike visions of ourselves as perfect and omnipotent,” Dr. Makari said. “But then there are these people in extremis — Alex Rodriguez, who hits 50 home runs in a season! Who do they think they are? And so there’s a certain pleasure in watching these people fall back to earth.”

Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, a Chicago analyst and president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, also sees a narcissistic narrative in reality shows like “American Idol.” “The healthy part of narcissism says, ‘I am a whole and wonderful person with something great inside of me,’ ” she said. “ ‘I can sing,’ or ‘I’m beautiful.’ ”

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A court-appointed psychiatrist recently described Peter Cook as a narcissist.Credit
Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

But the allure and tension in the shows are created, she added, as the audience hungers for the takedown. “Are you good enough? Or are you going to be humiliated? Then someone comes along and says, ‘Get out!’ That’s a narcissistic drama.”

In the last decade or so, social psychologists have studied narcissistic traits in actors, chief executives and politicians, where such tendencies are all but built into the job description. (Think Charles “I am France” de Gaulle.)

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory test that Columbia’s Professor Ames gives includes 16 pairs of choices. (“Everybody likes to hear my stories” or “Sometimes I tell good stories.”) He recalled one student who got a perfect score: “He boasted that he aced the narcissistic test.”

He tells executives the test can offer insight into how others perceive them, but is not an inherent predictor of success. High scorers often have an infectious energy, an intoxicating confidence; but they can be oblivious to advice and contemptuous of others.

Many people are condescending and self-involved, but they may not necessarily be narcissistic. Therapists say that to affix the label, the trait or the diagnosis, one must spend considerable time with the person. Determining that someone is a narcissist, Professor Ames added, “is not something you can gauge from television.”